Beginner’s Guide to Yerba Mate Tea

Getting started with yerba mate is simple. Grab yourself a handful of mate, add the herb into a frenchpress, teapot, or traditional mate gourd, then add hot water (or make it cold), wait a few minutes, then enjoy. That’s all you need to start drinking yerba mate, especially if you’re a a beginner. Now, if you want to lean a lot more than that, and go deep deep into the beautiful and intricate world of mate, then stick around and read on…

One of my favorite books is Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Suzuki. It’s a lesson on, no matter how experienced or seasoned you’ve become in any of life’s many arenas, humbly returning back to the basics and once again starting with a fresh pair of eyes; a renewed mind; and revitalized energy to continue building upon the fundamentals.

In essence, inheriting the child’s mind once more. An overly confident mind that becomes too full of itself, literally, remains “full” and stops expanding and absorbing. Atrophied and ossified and stale….

But no! Let’s go beyond that!

Shall we…? 🙂

In this new spirit of renewal, let us fertilize the soil and replant good seeds. Together, we can move mountains. With mate, what can hold us back? Nada!

So now I gladly present to you a Getting Started with Yerba Mate Guide.

Culling together dozens of articles and videos and guides I’ve produced over the years, I’ve synthesized a unique yerba mate journey through my personal vista and experience. From my first sip of mate back in 2009 to this very day, I’ve never stopped exploring this vitalizing and enriching herb from South America. It has changed my life forever.

For seasoned Materos and those freshly embarking upon their mate journey alike, nothing can be lost and only the world gained by drawing closer to this sacred herb we know as yerba mate.

Below, you’ll find a loose table of contents, more or less chronologically corresponding to the video via timestamp markers — allowing you to jump through time and space — and banking through some twists and turns in between, exploring the different landscapes and undulations and altitudes of yerba mate, from Classical Argentine cuts to selecting your first wooden or calabash gourd.